Maybe it’s the marketing, the press, or the public opinion. But Bing and Wolframalpha have not escaped the often redundant “Google killer?”, “next Google?” questions.

In this case, I think the crucial element missing to the potential success of these new search engines is to explicitly position themselves away from Google – that is radically changing the visual perspective of the consumer away from the traditional “search” interface. What I mean is, rebranding beyond just changing a name, or changing the engine technology. We still type a query, and get a result, right? As long as Google continues to deliver in this way without any overwhelming problems, Google will be fine.

An aside: The “search box” in and of itself is now the unofficial trademark of the search engine, and Google is the owner in that field. Maybe it’s a time for a change? How about a search engine that searches for me before I know I need to search?

At the end of the day, there isn’t a large enough, ground breaking value proposition that Bing and Wolframalpha have provided that will make me switch away from Google or to even use them on a daily basis. What Wolframalpha has done that Bing has not, however, is to distinguish itself as a “computational” search engine. This indicates that it is meant for a specific purpose, and as we all know, even with the massive hoards of money available to Microsoft’s disposal, there is no way to create another catch-all search solution that will be adopted en masse without something fundamentally different.

I like “decision engine”. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a good start. Microsoft just seems hesitant to move radically in a different direction. They had Live Search. They had MSN search. They’ve rebranded their search services for the nth time. It’s time that they truly rebranded: it’s time that they rebranded beyond the logo.

The fact is, consumers are now helping target and segment themselves. The next step is to create the tools to help expedite and aggregate this process. With Twitter search tools becoming more and more advanced, it’s only a matter of time.

This 10% number is not out of thin air, however. I measure the clicks on the links that I tweet out through Hootsuite every so often. Out of the 160 followers that I have, on average – I usually receive 25-30 click throughs. Assuming that some of these clicks might ahve been for fun, a 10% rate is a conservative amount that could maybe be applied to other users and the nature of their followers. No one’s saying that it can’t be higher, however.

This has also serious implications about a potential revenue stream for Twitter. If people or even companies are willing to pay to be on this list – maybe, just maybe, there can be a sponsored users list. I’m jumping to naming this list the “sponsored” users list, because once the online community realizes that this list has been tainted with users that are paying themselves in, the genuine suggestive nature of the list can be seriously compromised.

Link: The amount and value of Twitter traffic

Here’s a little fun tool from Waggeneredstrom, a worldwide communications firm. They’ve utilized Twitter’s API to analyze “twendz” on Twitter: essentially, rating positive and negative feedback using key words scattered in tweets. This technology works by running every word they see related to the particular brand or product in question with their “positive/negative” ranking database. For example, “suck” and “poor” and “horrible” would be negative words – in a massive database of ranked words.

What happens next has phenomenal online “environmental assessment” implications. Each “keyword” you search, if popular enough, will have around 70 tweets that will be analyzed by this service at any given moment. It will gauge the positive or negative sentiments surrounding your brand or product at any given time.

It still has its flaws – for example, keywords like “Rogers” can me mixed with people like Ted Rogers – a lot of keywords can be mistaken for another thing. There is a lot of potential with other tools like this though – Twitter – as I’ve mentioned before – is now truly becoming the real true realtime search engine for anything (public opinion, and, even health trends).

Link: Twendz

Although I disagree that we should ignore blogs or even start phasing them out – they are the true content creators. Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, and other social tools only share original content. In Groundswell’s Social Technographics: we see the importance of content creators. Blogs are the perfect platform to ensure brevity, completeness, and true online media coverage and content creation.

A brilliant takeaway idea for this would be a micro-feed specialized replacement for Technorati: a specialized search engine and ranking system for real-time, micro-sharing services. I think this is an idea that Twitter should definitely experiment with.

Twitter’s search engine, purchased from Summize a few months ago, effectively cements Twitter’s enormous potential as being the first true real-time search engine. Ranking trackbacks, re-tweets, and other connections in and out from tweets would be a great way to link buzz-generating resources connecting in and out of Twitter’s sharing platform. Twitter is, essentially, a sharing platform as well.

Link: TechCrunch: Are Blogs Losing Status?

Charging for content may be a very selfish way to go about preserving the media industry – but it may compromise the very fiber of the internet and all the standards that it has grown and been built upon. The question is – will you charge, if others start charging?

Link: Why The Media Must Charge for Web Content

Several instances are noted – Cottonelle – a major corporation – has an all-flash website that isn’t friendly to spiders – and Lenovo, that has missed out on rerouting Google past their country-selector page and has compromised Google’s ability to make a meaningful cached version of their website.

An additional problem lies in several websites that don’t drive traffic from their specific brands but drive traffic from specific long-tail searches – this is summarized well here:

It depends–but especially for large retailers,  SEO is important. It’s sites like Bizrate, eBay, and Nexttag that keep showing up in the top of Google when searching for Long Tail queries like “yellow queen size flannel sheets”.

These results suck. Where are the brands/enterprises that carry this merchandise? Where is JCPenney? Target? LL Bean? Lands End? They might be advertising through PPC, but 85% of consumers click on the natural listings.

How will you attempt to mend the rift the divides IT capabilities from inherently marketing-related initiatives? How can IT and Marketing live together and progress in a more unified way?

Link: SEO at the Enterprise Level a Major Flop